By Cody Willard

On Friday’s I publish Weekend Vittles — sorta just some random thoughts into the weekend..
* A spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase says that the reason the company pulled its own money from Madoff last year was because they got suspicious about the Ponzi scheme the dude was putting on. But she says, “we did not have the right to disclose those our concerns” to their own clients who had money with Madoff. I guess now they want to create more laws to protect you from being protected? Regulations often lull people into a false sense of security. As evidenced by the fact that Wall Street and Washington, the two most heavily regulated industries in this country, are so corrupt and have destroyed your savings and retirements despite all those regulations. Rather than pretend some idiot bureaucrats can actually stop nefarious geniuses from lying and stealing from you…how about we PUNISH those nefarious geniuses like Vikram Pandit, Dick Fuld, and Ken Lewis when we catch them. Instead, those crooks convince their cronies who were SUPPOSED TO BE REGULATING THEM to instead give them welfare in the form or TARP and bad debt guarantees and so on.

We should be fighting for harsh punishment for lying and stealing and not for illusory pre-emptive regulation. No?

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* Brutal day, brutal week, brutal month for the markets, eh? Coming on top of a brutal year. You notice that the main catalyst for the markets each and every day are simply the words coming out of press conferences in Washington, DC? As I noted in yesterday’s column and again below — it comes to figure that the market will be back in bull mode when things like profit reports matter. That said, Amazon’s report was stellar and the shorts were killed in that name today. Why not focus on shorting horrible companies in bad sectors rather than great companies like Amazon in bad sectors like retail? Seems rather straightforward when you think about it actually…buying great companies in good sectors and shorting bad companies in struggling sectors is probably not a bad pair-trade strategy.

All that said, with the market once again around the 8,000 mark, I wouldn’t be much of a trader or an investor just yet. If the playbook says we’re rangebound between about 7000 and 9500 then 8000 is sorta no-man’s land once again. Patience ain’t always exciting. But investing and trading isn’t supposed to be about excitement, you know?

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* I’m going to repeat this — It’s the magnitude of both the dollars and the magnitude of the disruption of the rule of law that this new political paradigm we’ve entered that really has the markets worried. Trillions of dollars of capital that used to work its way through the system chasing profits will now be chasing politics. In case you were wondering, profits — not politics — make stocks go up.

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*Also, here’s my best John Madden imitation to to explain how your money went to the Cerberus Illuminati connections. Must be nice to be able to call up your friend Obama and Bush and get tens of billions in welfare when you realize that your GMAC and Chrysler investments are insolvent. Fight the power!

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* The politicians and talking heads are lying to you to get your money when they say things like “if we don’t do TARP and the bad debt guarantees, the banking sector will collapse!”. Look, we have laws in this country that are already wildly favorable to the banking sector (tell me again why it’s so necessary to devalue my parent’s hard earned savings by artificially lowering the FED interest rate EVER? Much less to put it at 0% which will guarantee the destruction of the value of their money for anybody who saves their cash). We don’t need to prop up the people who were rich enough and foolish enough to buy equity in a bank or who were wealthy enough and stupid enough to lend those banks money when it was obvious that those banks were levering up that money and lending it to people who were buying property at bubbled levels without any background checks. Come on, people — it’s simple:

Take over each and every insolvent bank in this country. Completely wipe out their shareholders. Make their debt holders feel oodles of pain and get cents on their dollar at best. I suppose we’ll hear that we’ll use welfare dollars to keep depositors whole. That said, even ensuring bank savings deposits is a form or redistributing wealth from those who researched their banks before depositing the money they were rich enough to deposit…

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* I’m not much of a huge sports fan these days (still like to play sports though), but I am a big Kurt Warner fan…the dude worked groceries and played in scrub leagues til he persevered long enough to become an NFL season and Super Bowl MVP. Go Cards.

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And with that, I’ll thank you for reading this week and see you Monday.

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About The Cody Word

Cody Willard writes the Revolution Investing investment newsletter for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com He is the founder of WallStreetAll-Stars.com and the principal of CL Willard Capital. Cody serves as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is on the University of New Mexico Alumni Board. He was an anchor on the Fox Business Network, where he was the co-host of the long-time #1-rated show on the network, Fox Business Happy Hour. Cody, a former hedge fund manager, and his stock picks and economic outlooks have been featured on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ABC’s 20/20, CBS Evening News, CNBC’s SquawkBox, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, as well as in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other outlets.